


The Dream Quest of Brad Crawford

by Daegaer



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Assassins, Elder God, Gen, Psychic Abilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-07
Updated: 2005-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-23 04:05:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/246109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daegaer/pseuds/Daegaer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three times Brad Crawford dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he gloried in the dreams that showed him wealth and power unimaginable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dream Quest of Brad Crawford

**Author's Note:**

> Owing some certain and eldritch debts to [_The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath_](http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thedreamquestofunknownkadath.htm), by H.P. Lovecraft
> 
> Originally written for [It Hurts My Brain](http://ithurtsmybrain.livejournal.com).

Three times Brad Crawford dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he gloried in the dreams that showed him wealth and power unimaginable. Before him stretched halls of teeming workers, crying one to the other in many and varied tongues as they wrought the fates of nations. The screens flashed knowledge and ruin, and inestimable wealth and immense and obscene numbers flickered past. It inflamed his blood, it made him a god, a daemon, a king. The sunlight glinted across the roofs of the city's palaces, its great and open squares, its tall and glowering towers that reached the sky itself. It was London, it was Beijing, it was New York.

It was Tokyo.

 

Desiring within himself to see with his own waking eyes the great buildings and beauties of the city of his dreams, Crawford besought the grey and dread elders of Eszett that they would send him where his heart list, but they would not, saying they had need of him and those who served him in Germany. Bowing his head, Crawford left their grim presence, taking his leave not to do, as they fondly thought, their bidding, but to study and learn for himself what power he might obtain in that far off city. At last, worn thin by reading pages that showed their ink only in the faint light of the stars or when the reader brushed his own blood across their eldritch and sere leaves, he found that which the elders of his cult had wished no man to know: that in Tokyo the veils of the world grow thin, gnawed upon as they are by creatures that prowl the edges of sleep, breaking through to prey upon dreamers of dreams. There, in the furthest east, might one call upon the names that must not be called upon - even the name that costs a man's sanity and soul but to speak, that of the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, who beyond the bounds of life and time devours himself in his blind madness as all about him the Outer gods pipe and dance for his pleasure and for their vile and blasphemous lives, for any that cease in their eternal whirling are perforce drawn close to their idiot lord and devoured. Of them all, only the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, the messenger of Azathoth, may approach their lord unmolested, only he may insinuate his pestilent and virulent bulk into the world of waking men, to draw souls and minds away for the entertainment of his lord and, so the forbidden books say, for his own obscenities and sustenance.

All this, Crawford read and learned in the darkest and most forgotten of the libraries sequestered in the strongholds of Eszett. Seizing the knowledge to himself, he fled to the embrace of those who served him, whispering in their ears that they should share in all his power if they would but aid him now. If he could but tear back the veils of the world, he murmured insinuatingly in their hearing, would they not all become as the gods they had reached? With subtle and sly caressings and whisperings he worked, sliding past the resistances of Schuldig, in whose sighs he heard at last capitulation. To Farfarello he held out the promise of divine - nay, diabolical! - strength, enough to wreak any blasphemy that pale and monocular being could wish. Gently he spoke to Nagi of the power at last to force acceptance of his weird and silent self upon the society of men. When all were united in their devotion to his will, he sent them forth to work upon those who stood in his way. With persuasions and seductions, with vile murders and outrages, they slowly accomplished their detestable aims, finding themselves ordered at last to Tokyo and to the side of one the elders said must be guarded and trained, as a man trains plants in the way they must grow.

For over a year they worked, protecting the grotesque fool of a man they were set to guard, and his sons who were worse than fools, while all along Crawford laid his plans, having hints and reports of visions sent to the elders of Eszett, who indeed received such well in their dry and gloomy haunts. When the time came, Crawford bade his men abandon the fool who thought them his playthings, for word had come to him by diverse secret means that the elders were now altogether of his mind and sought to summon Azathoth from his dreadful and noxious halls beyond the stars.

"Will they succeed?" asked Schuldig, his voice high and wavering, his glower deepening as Crawford looked upon his with scorn.

"No," said Crawford. "Azathoth may not come forth. It is a mere folly on their part. But in truth we may use this summoning to gain a measure of that awesome presence's power." He knew well from his forbidden learning that the blind and idiot god might not stir from the centre of the Outer gods ceaseless and whirling dance, that only his messenger, the crawling choas, Nyarlahotep had leave to walk the lands of men.

"What of the girls?" asked Nagi, for they had seized two girls, the very image of each other, to be used in the obscenities of the bizarre ceremonies the elders had planned.

"We will keep she who is more likely to be a perfect vessel for the summoning," said Crawford. "When we have dispatched with the elders" - for so his twisting and treacherous mind had resolved - "we shall use her to summon forth power beyond that which we can easily image. Until that day we shall keep her pure and maiden. The other girl, useless to us, the elders may have."

Farfarello looked upon that maiden, cowering in the corner. "May we have her first?" he asked.

"We want their ceremony to fail, do we not?" smiled Crawford, his eyes cruel and cold, like chalcedony laid within the tomb. "We may all have her."

The dread day dawned, and Crawford smiled to see the false girl, a weapon known only to his men and him, arrayed in the finest samite and laid upon the altar. Her tears and piteous moans had been stayed with subtle and devious draughts, and she lay as one dead upon the freezing stone, her pale limbs slack and unmoving. The summoning of the daemon sultan began, the elders striving over her limp and unresisting form. Even as they sought to incarnate Azathoth within the girl's - no longer maiden's! - body, Crawford laboured likewise over the form of the true sacrifice, using all his strength to call forth but a measure of the power and knowledge Azathoth surely possessed. Even as he worked the doors flew open. There stood the maiden's brother and his sworn friends! Reaching out with all his occult strength, Crawford called upon Azathoth to enter his chosen vessel, to lie within the mind of his perfect host as maggots lie, wriggling and crawling within the noxious cadavers of those given over to decay and ruin. A fierce and merciless fight began - the elders lay dead, their summoning interrupted; only the desperation of the maiden's brother and his purity of heart allowed him fight on. All at once, Crawford felt he had been victorious, and reached out with what he felt to be monstrously increased and grotesque powers to crush his foe. All at once, the truth was clear to him, and he went screaming and mad to his fate. About him the great and gloomy halls of sacrifice crumbled as the tower in which he fought fell into the cold and frigid embrace of the sea, that sea in which the Kraken dwells, in which Great Cthulhu Himself lies dreaming in sunken Rlyeh!

Eons as it seemed, but in truth no more than an hour later, those who served Crawford awoke upon the wet and freezing sand, seeing he who was their leader standing by them, his eyes fixed upon the pale and distant stars. Coughing and weak, they sat up and looked upon the calm and level sea.

"Well," said Schuldig. "Both the summonings failed. No matter! Do we not live?"

"Are you so sure the summonings failed?" asked Crawford, his voice light and pleasant, yet carrying within it the seeds of fury and cruelty beyond the bounds of men. "Come, Schuldig, read my mind and know the truth."

Schuldig looked upon his leader, whom he had sworn to follow, with dreadful oaths and many private proofs of devotion and thought at last how Crawford had sworn that Azathoth could not touch them, that he was bound firm within his distant and drear halls, for of all the Outer gods, only Nyarlahotep, the messenger of Azathoth, had leave to walk the world of men.

"I accept your word," he said, seeing how Crawford's eyes reflected a light not seen in our pleasant, sunlit world. "I trust you, as you well know . . . sir."

Crawford smiled then, and his smile - always cold! Always cruel! - was none that mortal man had seen for uncounted eons.

"Then let us be gone," he said, turning his back upon the sea. "I have work I would be about."

Silent and heavy with suspicion and fear, the little group left the shore. Well for the world of man that they had all perished in the unforgiving sea! But such are the ways of the gods, to cast man out and watch from afar as ruin overtakes all his plans. The mild gods of earth stay their revels in unknown Kadath, and watch with trembling forms as the Outer gods have at last their will wreaked, with none to stop them.


End file.
